Peace through puzzles

This is a paean to New York Times puzzles. Not sure what I’d do without them, in These Troubled Times™. 

Every morning I get up, don my buffalo robe (really just heavy terry cloth), slippers and ridiculous pajama pants, and venture forth with iPad in hand. I  force myself to ignore the news or social media, pour a cup of coffee, and consider the day’s puzzles.

First, Wordle. By now it’s probably my least favorite of the puzzles, since it’s going on three years old and the daily solve is starting to seem more a matter of luck than strategy. Wordle used to be based on a large, static dictionary of five-letter words, but now there is a puzzle master whose job it is to mess with your day. You get a lot of words with two sets of double letters or other rare combinations. A great victory for me is getting it in two, an average one is four, and I consider it a defeat if it takes five or six. I’ve been getting quite a few fives lately.

Then Strands. It’s like those word-search booklets you used to find in a Safeway checkout aisle. The trick is parsing that day’s theme phrase. It seems simple but for me it always requires a bit of thought. Three wrong guesses and you get a hint. My personal credo is that hints are for dopes. Never mind that I required one yesterday.   

Finally, Connections. Sixteen words on a grid and you have to pick groups of four that have one thing in common. I’m always amazed at how opaque everything seems at first, and then – just like that – a set will reveal itself. I take my time with this one, because puzzle editor Wyna Liu is pretty good at making sure each set of words has some plausible overlap. My personal rule of thumb is to never select the first set that comes to mind. It’s usually wrong. 

That’s how I start the day. To end it, I rely on the New York Times crossword puzzles. I print them out and do them in pencil on a clipboard. Only Thursday through Saturday, though. The other days don’t require much thought, and the tiny type in the Sunday puzzle has gotten too hard to read. Also, Sunday is a lot easier than it used to be. Either that or I’ve gotten smarter, which seems unlikely.

Anyway, thanks NYT! I dig the daily diversion. Each minute spent on your excellent puzzles is a minute I don’t spend contemplating the end of the republic. Do fascists like puzzles? I kind of think they don’t.